Gilmore Girls revival: How Amy Sherman-Palladino was inspired by Sherlock

Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino’s inspiration for the Netflix reboot came from a seemingly unlikely source: Sherlock.

While some anticipated the Gilmore revival would come in the form of a movie (Kelly Bishop championed that idea), others speculated a new season should be seen on network television. But Sherman-Palladino didn’t like that plan: “We wanted to do it off-network and without commercials so we didn’t have Supergirl flying through.”

So she looked to the BBC production for inspiration. “I’m massively into Sherlock and what I love about Sherlock is the format is longer than an hour. They’re their own little mini-movies. It felt like a format that would work well for us on a storytelling level and as writers we would enjoy delving into.”

Sherman-Palladino even mentioned Sherlock over lunch with Lauren Graham, when explaining her idea for the revival. “We were having lunch,” Graham recalls. “And that was where she really laid out what her thought was about it … talking about the model of Sherlock as both the amount of time and also the way they do specials.”

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And in the same way that a viewer could still follow Sherlock without having seen previous seasons (or series, as they call them across the pond), Sherman-Palladino wanted Gilmore newbies to enjoy the Netflix movies without having seen the previous 153 episodes. “We wanted to do something that broadened it in a sense,” she says. “We weren’t interested in doing something that was ‘just for the cool kids.’ ”

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